Word Golf

If we look up Word golf in the index it refers the reader to this passage: “Playing a game of worlds, promoting pawns To ivory unicorns and ebon fauns” (ln 819-820), which is itself playing the game as world is one letter off of word. However, this passage is also referring to a game of chess. Nabokov writes in Speak, Memory that composing chess problems is like the “writing of one of those incredible novels where the author, in a fit of lucid madness, has set himself certain unique rules that he observes, certain nightmare obstacles that he surmounts, with the zest of a deity building a live world from the most unlikely ingredients” (220). The world of chess is simultaneously the world of art. In the index, the reader is led from Lass, Mass, Mars, Mare, to finally end with Male. These word games seem to enforce the theme of endless relations and correspondences. As Nabokov himself suggests: “the comic and the cosmic ‘sides of things’ differ only by ‘one sibilant’” (137).

(I apologize for no citations, those will come later!)